HPE lab boffins have finally, after years of work, built a proof-of-concept prototype of their fairytale memory-focused computer, The Machine. The achievement is bittersweet.
A decision has been made within Hewlett Packard Enterprise management to step back from manufacturing and selling the much-hyped fabled device as a …

Analysis
HPE is undertaking the single most determined and ambitious architectural redesign of a server’s architecture in recent history in the shape of The Machine.
We'll try to provide what Army types call a sitrep about The Machine, HPE's "completely different" system: its aims, its technology and its situation. Think of this as a …

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a design of a working nanoscale computing device that could complete the Feynman Grand Challenge.
Richard Feynman’s famous talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” is considered a precursor to the boom in nanotechnology. Although there has been much progress …

Comment
Dell and EMC are culturally separated by their different approaches to product development, to servers in Dell and storage in EMC. In the combined house, what will be the effect?
Dell's forte, or at least the chief of them, is a superbly executed supply chain, box-development and shifting at a level no one has bettered - well …

Comment
HPE's Synergy is, it thinks, the next great advance in servers and is far more capable than hyper-converged infrastructure systems, being able to provision bare metal as well as servers for virtual workloads as well as containerised ones.
Getting a grip on this beast is tricky. Is it a form of dynamically reconfigurable …

Early-stage startup Xitore says it is developing bigger and faster non-volatile flash DIMMs to give servers a performance boost so they could run more VMs and containers and run them faster by sidestepping high latency storage IOS.
It is taking up the baton brought onto the field by Netlist and Diablo Technologies and …

Analysis
WD, with its acquired SanDisk operation, is squaring up to Intel and Micron’s XPoint with ReRAM - Resistive RAM technology.
Back in October last year, the then independent SanDisk joined forces with HPE to fight XPoint. The two signed an agreement to develop Storage-Class Memory (SCM*), a non-volatile storage medium with DRAM- …

HPE has signalled it's focussed on having 3PAR arrays support NVMe at both drive and connectivity levels.
An HPE blogger says: "We are actively working with our partners on incorporating NVMe into our current and next-generation platforms. This includes efforts around the front end with RDMA and FC, as well as the back-end …

StoreServ arrays use special hardware, an ASIC, to accelerate storage array operations, and this is redesigned for each major generation of the arrays. The current design is generation 5.
Siamak Nazari is an HPE fellow and StoreServ architect, and is heavily involved in the design of the forthcoming gen 6 ASIC.
An ASIC design …

Comment
Martin Fink’s HPE Labs has been dangling the Memristor in front of us for years. With Fink retiring and HPE Labs losing its independence, becoming part of Antonio Neri’s Enterprise Group, inventing far out blue sky stuff will likely shift to devising technologies that can be realistically productised. The Memristor cannot.
The …

Martin Fink, the chief techie straddling Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s global Labs is quitting just as the prototype of his most ambitions project to date, The Machine, edges closer.
In a blog note today, CEO Meg Whitman confirmed the CTO will be “retiring” at the end of the year after more than three decades at the company.
“ …

Analysis
IBM has demonstrated a 3-bit Phase-Change Memory chip with IBM Zurich researcher Dr. Haris Pozidis talking about it in a YouTube video and not mentioning 3D XPoint once.
The idea is to counter the relatively high cost of PCM chips by giving them 3 bits per cell, TLC or triple-level cells, instead of just one - clever.
This …

Analysis
Latency is always the storage access bête noire. No one likes to wait, least of all VMs hungry for data access in multi-threaded, multi-core, multi-socket, virtualized servers. Processors aren't getting that much faster as Moore's Law runs out of steam, so attention is turning to fixing IO delays as a way of getting our …

Comment
At the far end of HPE's storage and compute strategy is the Machine, the dynamically composable infrastructure thing with separately scalable compute, memory/storage and networking resources.
It has a huge flat and persistent memory space using storage-class memory (SCM). It was supposed to use memristors, but since that …

Comment
So, is XPoint memory phase-change memory ... or not? An IM Flash Technologies co-CEO just gave a strong signal it might be phase-change, but doubt remains as Intel and Micron have kept their secret process ingredient hidden.
IMFT is the Intel/Micron joint venture to manufacture flash chips in Lehi, Utah. Guy Blalock and Keyvan …

+Comment
HP and SanDisk are joining forces to combat the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory threat, and developing their own Storage-Class Memory (SCM) technology.
SCM is persistent memory that runs at DRAM or near-DRAM speed but is less costly, enabling in-memory computing without any overhead of writing to slower persistent data storage …

Semiconductor market researcher Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has produced an 80-page report looking into what XPoint memory is, how it could be used and what its prospects are.
XPoint memory was unveiled by Micron and Intel in July to general amazement. The pair claimed it was 1,000 times faster than NAND, ten times denser …

Comment
A presentation at the Flash Memory Summit contained speculation about Intel/Micron’s 3D XPoint memory – what it is and how Intel might use it. We’ve tested some of its contents with a knowledgeable industry expert and can cast a little more light, hopefully, on what it is and where it’s going.
The Thursday August 13 …

Next year, the world will start using products with an amazing new type of memory in them - or so say Intel and Micron, allied to produce the 3D XPoint chippery.
This is, we're told, a radical resistive-RAM technology that is bit-addressable, non-volatile, and forms a new memory tier between DRAM and NAND. That means software …

Comment
Succession, transformation and a customer buying pattern sea-change are simultaneously embroiling EMC’s top management and board in a perfect storm, according to CEO Joe Tucci in the quarterly results earnings call.
Six months after Joe Tucci’s last – and deferred – retirement date from running the EMC Federation, where he is …

Startup Avalanche is sampling an STT-RAM chip offering DRAM/SRAM speed, persistent storage, unlimited endurance and scalability beyond 10nm.
The holy unified memory chip grail is to replace DRAM, SRAM and flash with a single chip tech, offering the benefits of each without the drawbacks. Thus NAND cannot scale down psst 10nm and …

Bendy humans pose problems for wearable IT as devices break when they’re deformed. Flexible computers would be ideal – and a group of Korean boffins has devised some flexible PRAM tech to help with the problem.
They work at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and want to persuade us that having non- …

Future memory hardware startup Nantero has had a big funding round, suggesting its technology is getting closer to becoming a reality.
It got $31.5m in an over-subscribed round to continue developing its nanotube-based non-volatile RAM (NRAM) semiconductor technology, which it says has DRAM read/write speed and is ultra-high …

HP Discover
HP is still hard at work at the futuristic computing platform it has dubbed the Machine, and staffers from HP Labs were on hand at the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas this week to give an update on its progress.
There was even sample hardware on display, which HP Labs' Jaap Suermondt said was "evidence that we're actually …

The era of flash memory is anticipated to run out of road in the 2020s and newer technologies involving resistance and electron spin are poised to take over, delivering higher capacities, greater speed and DRAM-style addressability.
Some people ask if one of these new technologies could actually unify dynamic memory (RAM) and …

Multi-socket, multi-core CPUs are demanding entities: they have a gargantuan appetite for data which they suck up through a CPU-memory channel from DRAM, the server's memory.
This access happens in nanoseconds, billionths of a second. Getting data from places beyond memory, such as PCIe server flash cards, SSDs directly …

Comment
Suppose EMC and HP merged: the result would be an outrageous nightmare of overlapping storage products. Managers would run screaming into the darkness, and bean counters would spend millions converging products. It’s a no-go area, really.
Quick and dirty look at HP and EMC storage products
A quick and dirty look at HP and …

Research boffins at RMIT university in Melbourne have demonstrated a non-volatile memory at nanometer scale using memristive effects – and suggest it could help build a bionic brain.
The team, led by Dr Sharath Sriram, built a stacked structure using perovskite oxide with designed-in defects in its chemistry to demonstrate a …

HP reckons this software-designed fad sweeping the storage world is just a swing of the fashion pendulum and we'll go back to hardware soon enough.
Commodity public clouds haven't attracted much enterprise work and HP's Helion is well-placed for that.
Martin Fink, the company's chief technology officer, presented HP's views …

Comment
The hottest enterprise flash products company these days is SanDisk, and it has a great chance of becoming the most important non-volatile memory supplier of all – the EMC of enterprise flash.
There are four basic reasons:
It has a thriving and growing enterprise flash business
It has bought Fusion-io in May giving it a …

Boffins devising Resistive RAM (RRAM) have found that using porous silicon oxide makes the devices easier to manufacture, longer lasting and less power hungry.
The researchers, at Rice University, Texas, stumbled upon silicon oxide RRAM five years ago. The stuff works as computer storage by having differing resistance levels …

Comment
IBM and HP are trying to invent their way out of severe problems that lurk in their future.
Both companies face slowing sales in some of their traditional high-margin areas, like enterprise servers and other on-premises hardware. And both are having a tough time converting existing business divisions over to selling the high- …

Flash is at a crossroads. It cannot keep shrinking dies because, beyond a certain point, NAND cells produce too many errors, are slower to respond and have a shortened working life. Yet a University of Michigan professor's research may hold the key to the future of flash storage technology.
Flash foundry suppliers are working …

Comment
Hewlett-Packard is a mature company operating among other declining mature firms – all of whom have to compete with new, immature rivals. So how can it equip itself to prosper in the new era?
Cisco UCS Invicta racks
Old-hand Cisco got wise to the disruptive game early, coming up with UCS when everyone thought Dell, HP and …

The world's ferocious appetite for gadgets and computers has worked its magic again, driving storage prices down enough for Linux hoster Linode to cut the price of its servers, making it competitive with young rival Digital Ocean.
The 11-year old company announced on its birthday that it was adding a new server class to its …

HP Discover
HP's Discover conference, held over 10-12 June in Las Vegas, featured sessions from Intel, SanDisk and Toshiba as well as HP, and flash featured highly on the agenda. We've rounded up the most useful storage titbits for your reading pleasure.
We’re informed that HP is not talking to Simplivity about acquired that converged …

Updated
Dell thinks HP's bet-the-company approach on an entirely new open source operating system built around systems based on memristors and photonics is "laughable".
When asked at a meeting in San Francisco on Thursday about their thoughts on HP's just-announced, memristor-based "Machine OS", Dell software chief John Swainson and …

HP may have found a way to save itself from oblivion, but apparently the only way to be sure is to throw three quarters of its research team at an ambitious new product suite based on a much-hyped yet troublesome technology.
The beleaguered IT giant plans to rejuvenate itself with a set of advanced technologies that, when …

A Micron analysts day revealed the boys from Boise think nothing much will happen with resistive RAM technologies like the Memristor for five years, and that volatile/non-volatile memory configs for servers are going to grow.
During the conference itself Micron presented lots of technology goodies.
CEO Mark Durkan started out …

Flash had a fantastic year in 2013 with an enormous number of developments.
It was a year of generally positive flash transitions, with cell geometry shrinking, all-flash arrays springing up, flash companies being bought, flash companies crashing back to earth after inflated IPOs or just crashing, and happiness spraying out …

Three technological heavyweights have come together to spin-up a radically different supercomputer cluster designed to crunch "big data" workloads rather than the simulation and modeling jobs of typical HPC rigs.
The collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Intel, and Cray was announced on Monday and sees …

Blocks and Files
HP has warned El Reg not to get its hopes up too high after the tech titan's CTO Martin Fink suggested StoreServ arrays could be packed with 100TB Memristor drives come 2018.
In five years, according to Fink, DRAM and NAND scaling will hit a wall, limiting the maximum capacity of the technologies: process shrinks will come to …

At its San Francisco analyst day event, HP CEO Meg Whitman laid out the main points of the tech giant's storage strategy – and it looks like "traditional" storage is no longer a priority.
3PAR (StoreServ)
StoreOnce deduping arrays
StoreAll object storage
The 3PAR product line is HP's now largest storage contributor, …

There is a famous 4-box diagram, the one to end all 4-box diagrams; Gartner's Magic Quadrant. How would the all-flash array vendors; start-ups and mainstreamers alike, fare if located in a 4-box diagram space?
The storage desk here at El Reg did just that, using its sophisticated lower abdominal sensing organ and its patent- …

Analysis
WD has splashed or intends to spend a whopping $1.1bn on building its flash technology and products portfolio, in the most aggressive series of moves yet by a hard disk drive vendor into flash, and yet it still hasn't inked a long-term chip supply deal with a flash foundry.
Just yesterday it paid $685m for Virident. So what …

You can get a great picture of what's happening in the flash memory storage market by looking at the presentations from the recent Flash Memory summit here (warning, it's swimming in PDFs).
Over 150 documents are listed here, with file names reflecting their date of publication and the last name of their author, but …

Panasonic has claimed it will next month ship the world's first computer product that use ReRAM.
ReRAM has folks excited because it is as fast as RAM, but like flash memory retains information when powered down. Also known as Memristor RAM, a nod to the fact it combines the properties of a resistor and memory, the technology …

For a non-volatile storage medium flash development sure is volatile, as attendees at a distributor conference found out.
Aaron Rakers, managing director of analysts Stifel Nicolaus, attended the conference and sent out a despatch from it that contained a mouth-watering array of tit-bits.
The distributor had suppliers of …

Who are the ten most influential storage bosses? It should be an easy list to make but what do we mean by influential and should they be currently in post?
"Influential" means more than that just "our customers have bought boatloads of our kit!" An influential company's competitors have had to react to its products and strategy …